1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to the field of networking, specifically to the field of searching for and retrieval of information on a network.
2. Description of the Related Art
Wouldn't it be nice to be able to log onto your local Internet service provider, access the worldwide web, and search for some simple information, like "Please find me action movies with John Wayne which are in color?" or "Please find me audio files of Madonna talking?", or "I would like black and white photos of the Kennedy assassination". Or, how about even "Please find me an action movie starring Michael Douglas and show me a preview of portions of the movie where he is speaking loudly". Perhaps, instead of searching the entire worldwide web, a company may want to implement this searching capability on its intranet.
Unfortunately, text based search algorithms cannot answer such queries. Yet, text based search tools are the predominate search tools available on the internet today. Even if text based search algorithms are enhanced to examine files for file type and, therefore, be able to detect whether a file is a audio, video or other multimedia file, little if any information is available about the content of the file beyond its file type.
Still further, what if the search returns a number of files. Which one is right? Can the user tell from looking at the title of the document or some brief text contained in the document as is done by many present day search engines? In the case of relatively small text files, downloading one or two or three "wrong" files, when searching for the right file, is not a major problem. However, when downloading relatively large multimedia files, it may be problematic to download the files without having a degree of assurance that the correct file has been found.